Abstract
When Archie Green passed away at the age of ninety-one in March 2009, he left behind an extraordinary legacy of work—as a shipwright on San Francisco’s waterfront, as a prolific and influential scholar of workers’ culture, and as a tireless lobbyist for the American Folklife Preservation Act of 1976. Green’s legacy is especially meaningful for practitioners in the fields of labor studies and labor education, both as a scholar and as an organizer of conversations and projects that bridged the divides between union halls and universities. Sean Burns has done a great service by writing Archie Green: The Making of a Working-Class Hero, a fine study that does justice to its subject’s fascinating intellectual development and considerable impact.
Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research, Burns organizes his account of Green’s life and work into four parts, each consisting of a group of short, focused chapters. Part 1 highlights Green’s early political development, from his upbringing in LA’s working-class community of Boyle Heights to his undergraduate career, split between UCLA and UC Berkeley. Part 2 details Green’s early work and union history, from a stint in the Civilian Conservation Corps to foundational years on San Francisco’s waterfront, service in the Navy during World War II, and postwar organizing with the American Veterans Committee. Part 3 deals with Green’s midlife shift into an academic career and the ways in which his scholarship on vernacular music drew from his earlier history in the trades. Part 4 assesses Green’s lasting impact on the fields of folklore, labor history, and cultural studies.
Two additional elements make this book an especially valuable contribution. In a short foreword, historian David Roediger recounts his own collaborations with Green, including their work together on The Big Red Songbook (Charles H. Kerr Publishers, 2007). Folklorist and radio host Nick Spitzer’s epilogue recounts his encounters with Green in the seminar rooms and music halls of Austin, Texas, in the 1970s, and features an interview conducted just days before Green’s death. The book’s somewhat unorthodox construction—a monograph bracketed by contributions by two other scholars—works well and models a pluralism that Green himself would surely celebrate.
A major focus of the book is Green’s political formation within the anticommunist U.S. left of the 1930s and 1940s, a formation defined by “a combination of Wobbly anarcho-syndicalism, Trotskyist anti-Stalinism, and New Deal pragmatism” (p. 77). Burns successfully shows how Green’s worker-centered orientation, forged in the debates and struggles of his youth, fundamentally shaped his later commitments to vernacular culture and “laborlore.”
Burns’s treatment of Green as a figure for a larger historical phenomenon of the twentieth century—what Michael Denning has termed “the laboring of American culture” during the age of the CIO—allows the reader to understand one individual’s biography as part of the larger impact of workers’ culture over the past several decades. Burns is transparent about the tension between his interpretation and Green’s own take on the cultural politics of the New Deal era, which left him skeptical of the claims of later historians and theorists, including some whom Burns cites. The result of this tension is a productive dialogue with the past about the roots, meaning, and future of worker-centered cultural studies.
In addition to its sophisticated approach to historical interpretation, this book is notable for a number of wonderful anecdotes about the life of a remarkable human being. The reader is treated to such delightful scenes as that of a young Archie Green accompanying his father to hear Eugene V. Debs speak at LA’s Zelig Zoo, and of a slightly older Archie Green accompanying his sweetheart Louanne to hear Bob Wills perform in the working-class bars of wartime San Francisco. Indeed, Archie Green lived a remarkable life, one worthy of an entire library. Thanks to Sean Burns, we have a sturdy foundation.